יום שבת, 7 בינואר 2012

Holocaust -- The Poverty of Scholarship

New York Timesreview of recent biographies of Himmler and Heydrich implies, as most of Holocaust scholarship explicitly or implicitly does, that the Holocaust was executed by a relatively small group of perpetrators, a sort of sophisticated pogrom participants. This is far from truth.

Long before Hitler became a known political leader, the radical right was a mass movement in Germany, with a vast intellectual support. More than a million students were its members and it controlled the student organization and governing bodies. Antisemitism was its key ideology. Furthermore, it debated whether antisemitism should be of racial or of social character; the adopted decision was racial antisemitism. Initially, leaders of radical right considered Hitler and his party vulgar and without clear intellectual base. They even looked at his antisemitism with suspicion. It was, they claimed, of Austrian variety and not radical enough. They joined Hitler only after he had gained considerable popular support and proved himself to be a savvy politician.

Afterwards, in mid thirties, long before the Holocaust, the SS intellectual elite, anticipated war with Russia, and with no orders from above debated the means and ways for the final solution. The false assumptions of Holocaust scholarship that there must have been an written decree, a hierarchy, as if it is a military operation with a battle order, led to an enormous effort of futile search for documents certifying the assumption of the scholars. The German civil and military bureaucracies sucked the ways and means for the final solution with their social and ideological milk. The final solution was prepared during long time, by many civilians and officers. Hitler jumped the wagon and moved to the locomotive, but it was not him who put in motion. A cruel antisemite as he was, his first objective was to pander to the overwhelming majority that supported antisemitism. Become a leader first, by "democratic" elections, when in power join the others and kill the Jews.

The commanders of Einsatzgruppen, the special police commando units attached to the Army and charged with massacre of Jews, had academic education. Many of them had Ph.D or LLD degrees. They came from among the SS intellectuals . Contrary to all evidence and experience elsewhere the Holocaust scholarship assumes that a government can make a decision to kill and literally the next day indeed massacre hundred thousand Jews with no preparation. Government bureaucracy is slow. Mass killing needs years of preparations, of dedicated personnel, of resources, and of public support. Even if the Nazis were more efficient than the Western democracies, the slow process of decision making and operations could not have been reduced to no time. For the sake of comparison, one may look at much simpler and relatively insignificant decision, for instance at closing of Guantanamo, it has taken years, still to no avail.

German War Hero

In Germany, a modern country as it was in the time of Hitler, no major operation could have been possible without infrastructure, popular support and intellectual base. Contrary to Soviet Union at that time, Germany was not a total dictatorship. Even the non-Jewish wives of Jewish husbands dared to demonstrate against deportation of their spouses and won.

The Holocaust research community, in Israel, in the US and in other places, in part funded by German Government, ignores the place of the German public in giving birth to and executing the Holocaust. It is much nicer to blame few, or even few hundred individuals for an error of history. Everybody else goes home free.

Exploring intellectual roots of an evil movement are important not only because of search of truth, perhaps an obsolete word in post-modern academic jargon, or, some will say, because of the wish to "blame" Germany. The betrayal of intellectuals was mentioned in the context of support of Stalinism, nevertheless the topic remains largely unexplored. Evil may reside in the best of minds, not only in the stone hearts of criminals. It is not just a lesson about or from history; it may well be a part of our present.